If I have done the math right, Google expensed almost $200 million for “employee stock compensation”:
The Mountain View-based company earned $925.1 million, or $2.93 per share, during the three months ended in June. That compared with net income of $721.1 million, or $2.33 per share, at the same time last year.
If not for costs associated with employee stock compensation, Google said it would have earned $3.56 per share. That figure missed the average analyst estimate of $3.59 per share among analysts polled by Thomson Financial.
As of June 2006, Google had 7942 employees. Lets assume they have 10,000 now and they all get stock compensation. If that compensation is divided equally, each Google employees gets almost $20,000 in the second quarter. Not bad!
The Quantum Random Bit Generator Service has made available a random number generator that uses quantum theory to create real random numbers:
We use ‘Quantum Random Bit Generator’ (QRBG121), which is a fast non-deterministic random bit (number) generator whose randomness relies on intrinsic randomness of the quantum physical process of photonic emission in semiconductors and subsequent detection by photoelectric effect. In this process photons are detected at random, one by one independently of each other. Timing information of detected photons is used to generate random binary digits – bits. The unique feature of this method is that it uses only one photon detector to produce both zeros and ones which results in a very small bias and high immunity to components variation and aging. Furthermore, detection of individual photons is made by a photomultiplier (PMT). Compared to solid state photon detectors the PMT’s have drastically superior signal to noise performance and much lower probability of appearing of afterpulses which could be a source of unwanted correlations.
They have made a C++ and Matlab toolbox available.
If you want to compare kernel density estimates across years for a particular variable, putting each estimate on one graph will make it easy. The process is fairly straightforward in Stata (and even easier in Matlab…). First, we start with the simple ‘kdensity‘ command
kdensity income if year == 1990
Next, we append this command with the ‘addplot‘ function:
kdensity income if year == 1990, addplot(kdensity income if year == 1991)
and we can add even more with the ‘||’ syntax:
kdensity income if year == 1990, addplot(kdensity income if year == 1991 || kdensity income if year == 1992)
If we could use the ‘by’ option, this process would be much cleaner. Finally, we add a legend:
kdensity income if year == 1990, addplot(kdensity income if year == 1991 || kdensity income if year == 1992) legend(ring(0) pos(2) label(1 "1990") label(2 "1991") label(3 "1992"))
By default, you cannot include eps files in latex files complied and built into pdfs. To do so, include the following command in your preamble
\usepackage{epstopdf}
which converts any eps files to pdf before the file is compiled. I encountered some problems after this and had to modify the TeX->PDF commands in TeXNicCenter (hit Alt+F7) so that under “Command line arguments to pass to the complier” read:
--enable-write18 -interaction=nonstopmode "%pm"
Installing TeX and a LaTeX editor on Windows is simple. There are two steps. First, install the TeX packages, DVI reader and more with MiKTeX. Next, download TeXnicCenter, my preferred editor in Windows (just select the TeXnicCenter download). Finally, when installing the TeXnic, make sure that you set the TeX directory as
C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.6\miktex\bin
If you ever import data into Matlab in tab or comma delimited formats, be warned:
CSVREAD fills empty delimited fields with zero. Data files where the lines end with a comma will produce a result with an extra last column filled with zeros.
“dlmread” also suffers from this problem. So if you want to import a data file that possibly has null values, make sure the original source has some (usually numeric) way of distinguishing them. Or, you can use ‘textscan‘ which replaces “null” with “NaN.” The function requires more manual inputs, but unlike ‘csvread’ or ‘dlmread’ it can be adjusted for almost any quirky data.
Although there is not an explicit option to export a MySQL table to a tab-delimited file in PHPmyAdmin, it is possible. Simply go the database of your choice, then select the table for export. Then click on the “Export” tab and on that page select “CSV.” Finally, in the field “Fields terminated by” put in ‘\t’ without the quotes. Note that it saves the files with a ‘.csv’ extension, but that shouldn’t matter to most applications.
